


The Healing

by Shearmouth



Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Carlos Reyes is wise and also soft, Emotional Intelligence, Healing, Hurt TK Strand, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, TK is hurt but also brave, Tenderness, These boys own my whole heart, What Comes Next, What comes after
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23448346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shearmouth/pseuds/Shearmouth
Summary: Missing scene from 1x10.Carlos and TK hold on to each other.
Relationships: Carlos Reyes/TK Strand
Comments: 17
Kudos: 283





	The Healing

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so whipped for this fandom, guys. For all its shittiness, quarantine is serving my writing practice and fanfic well.   
> The title comes from the Lone Star promo a little while back where they call TK "The Healing."   
> Thanks for reading!

Carlos couldn’t stop bouncing his leg. It was a bad habit, an annoying one, but at least five other people in the waiting room were doing it too so he figured no one would get on his case about it. The waiting room with shitty lighting and the smell of sickness and the distinct absence of the only person Carlos wanted to see right now.

His hands were still a little shaky from the solar flare. Christ, what a crazy afternoon. He came to expect the unexpected as a cop, but there was only so much Carlos was willing to take. The last week had rattled his cage. He was going to need a vacation, a spa day and maybe a trip to his mother’s house after all this.

But he couldn’t leave yet, even if he wanted to. A magnetism was holding him here. So he waited, and bounced his leg, and tried not to think.

The ER entry doors opened. TK came out.

Carlos stilled, and straightened. TK was alone, and he looked small and lost and scraped-out. He was holding himself carefully, like he was still in pain. Under the collar of a white hospital-issued t-shirt, the crisp edge of a new bandage crept up his throat.

Their eyes met. Carlos smiled gently. TK slumped, raw relief softening the tired planes of his face.

Carlos stood and crossed the room. TK met him halfway.

“TK, listen–“ Carlos began.

And went silent when TK threw his arm around Carlos’s neck and kissed him like they were alone in the room.

The second their bodies met, Carlos knew something had changed. There was a sweetness there now, a vulnerability, something grateful and gripping in the movement of TK’s mouth on his. Carlos sighed and relaxed into him, even as he felt TK almost melt against his chest. He cupped TK’s jaw gently and grounded himself in the feel of him. He was here. He was safe. The fear that had vibrated through Carlos’s bones since he saw TK disappear into the ambulance with blood on his shirt and an O2 mask on his mouth fell away. A careful hope bloomed in its place.

Eventually they broke apart, though neither pulled back. TK rested his forehead against Carlos’s and sighed. His breath was warm.

“Hey, tiger,” Carlos murmured. TK hummed happily.

“You wanna get out of here?” TK asked, just as he had on the night they met, and danced together, and Carlos had begun to realize there was something different about this green-eyed boy with a broken heart.

He took TK’s hand. “Hell yes.”

000

“I was going to propose.”

They were sitting in a park not far from the firehouse. The flare had driven everyone out of public spaces, so it was just the two of them, the only other sound the soft rattle of wind through the quaking aspen and cottonwoods.

“It was fucked up. It was desperate,” TK continued. “He’d been acting weird. Distant. I thought…I thought he was pulling away from me, and I didn’t want to lose him. I thought a grand gesture would fix things. We met for dinner. I had gotten a ring.” TK was hunched forward like he was waiting to be attacked, propping his weight on his shoulder, forearm laid against his thigh. Carlos didn’t touch him, but he opened his stance, trying to reassure TK that he was here, and he was listening.

“He told me…he was in love with someone else. He’d been cheating on me for months.” TK’s voice cracked. “I’d been clean for six years, and just like that I was twenty again and I wanted to die. I got Oxys somewhere and went home. I didn’t care if I overdosed. I don’t even remember what I was thinking.”

Carlos had his eyes trained on TK’s face, and the raw grief and shame there made Carlos’s heart crack.

“The next thing I knew I was waking up to my dad holding Narcan. He was terrified. The team was there. I could see it in their faces, and my dad told me later– when they found me my heart had stopped.”

_Jesus, TK._

Carlos couldn’t help it then, and he reached out to rest his hand softly on TK’s wrist. Grounding him. Grounding them both. He relaxed a little when TK turned his hand to weave his fingers into Carlos’s.

“I OD’ed when I was twenty, but it hadn’t been that close. My dad had been offered the job down here. He’d turned it down. But after that, after how much I’d fallen backward, he knew I had to get out of there, even if I didn’t. So we moved here. And I started over.”

TK turned his head, locked eyes with Carlos, and Carlos just wanted to hold him and keep him safe and tell him how loved he was when he saw the loss in TK’s eyes. The way he was begging Carlos to understand but was afraid to ask him to.

“That’s why I ran. Why I acted like I did. It wasn’t you. Carlos, I’ve never had a guy treat me the way you do. The way you’re kind, and compassionate.” TK looked down. “I was too scared. Too...triggered. And before you feel bad about it like I know you are, you didn’t know. You couldn’t know.”

TK looked at him fiercely, and Carlos bit his lip. He’d seen right through him. The flash of guilt at how he’d somehow managed to hit every one of TK’s weak points subsided.

“And at the time, I couldn’t tell you, because I had this thought and feeling in my mind that I didn’t deserve your kindness, and I was too fucked up and too gun-shy to try again with someone. I didn’t want either of us to get hurt. And I knew you were different, and I didn’t want to lose you. But I was too scared to ask you to stay.”

TK looked down again, and a flash of fear, a different kind of fear, moved over him. “And then I got shot. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember much from the hospital. But when I was in the coma, I remember you being there.”

Carlos tried to conceal his shock. “You do?”

TK nodded. “Not…literally. But I remember your presence. I remember my dad, and the team too, but I knew you were there too. Somewhere in there, I knew you were there. At first I thought it was my imagination, and then the others told me that you came that first night. And my dad told me…you’d been crying.”

Carlos ducked his head and swallowed against the memory.

He’d heard the gunshot. They hadn’t known there was a weapon on scene, or APD would’ve cleared the room first. Some part of him thought he should’ve known somehow. He’d heard yelling from inside, surprise, fear. He heard Michelle report that a firefighter was down.

Carlos had been outside. He’d been on scenes where people got hit before. Where people had died.

But the second he heard Michelle say that, it took all of his willpower not to run inside and make sure that the dread in his heart was wrong, that the voice in his head screaming at him was mistaken, that the one who got hit was _not TK, not TK, not TK, please not TK._

Then Owen Strand came out with terror in his face and his son in his arms, and Carlos almost collapsed.

There were people all around Owen, and Carlos could barely see when TK was laid on a gurney and a respirator fitted over his face. But he could see the blood across TK’s chest and pouring from the corner of his mouth. He could hear the torturous sound of TK trying and failing to breathe around what Carlos realized, with numb shock, was a collapsing lung. He could sense the urgency in Michelle’s voice as she barked orders and got the gurney loaded into the ambulance.

And then he was gone. In a blur of red lights and sirens and shock, he was gone.

When the scene was secure and Carlos’s job was done, he got back to the precinct going thirty over. He got in his car and started driving and called Michelle.

The sound of her voice made the sob that had been building in his chest for the last hour and a half break free. “Michelle,” he choked, “is he– is he–“

“He’s alive.” Michelle sounded almost as stripped out as Carlos felt. “He’s alive, Carlos, but it’s not good. He flatlined in the ambulance.”

Carlos went numb and almost swerved off the road.

Michelle relayed the information she knew he needed to hear– a punctured and deflated lung, hypovolemic shock, anoxia for four minutes.

“He’s at Union Memorial. Last I heard he’s still in surgery. Go to him, Carlos.” Michelle hung up, and Carlos drove faster.

TK was out of surgery by the time he arrived. Someone told him the room number.

And before he went there, Carlos found a quiet corner and cried harder than he had in years.

When he got to TK’s room, found the team huddled outside and Owen sitting with his back to the door, the tears kept coming and Carlos barely hid them.

And when he sat and braced himself in the sound of TK’s breathing, stroked circles onto his bicep and ran his fingers through his hair, tried and failed to process that this was TK, this was the hurricane that never stopped, the boy Carlos had fallen way too hard for was lying still and silent and barely alive, Carlos had never felt so undone.

Barely alive for the second time in six months, _Jesus Christ._

Carlos’s eyes prickled thinking of it even now.

He gripped TK’s hand a little tighter. TK gripped back.

“When I woke up,” TK continued, “it was like everything had been thrown up in the air. I didn’t know my place in the world anymore, just that I had nearly lost it. And for the first time in my life I was questioning everything, because I’ve wanted to be a firefighter since I was six. But I was realizing that there was so much I hadn’t processed. So much I didn’t know.”

TK blinked quickly. His eyes were red. “And I missed you. And I didn’t want to lose you, but I was still so scared and so confused and I couldn’t give my heart away when I barely had a hold on it myself.”

TK took a shaky breath, and Carlos couldn’t help but mirror him.

“And then the flare happened. And I was trying to save that woman in the bus, and everything was on fire or underwater and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought this was it, this was my third strike, and I was really going to die this time, and I didn’t want to. Christ, I didn’t want to go, Carlos.”

Carlos felt a tear slip out. He let it fall.

“Then my dad was there. My team was there. And as soon as I realized I had gotten another chance everything fell into focus. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew who I wanted to do it with. And I realized that I didn’t want to lose one more second of my time on this earth to fear.”

TK swiped at his eyes, and when he looked back at him Carlos could see something new there. Something hopeful.

“I run into burning buildings for a living, Carlos, but I’ve been afraid my whole life. Afraid of losing my dad again, or being rejected by my family for being gay, or relapsing, or Jesus, just staying alive. And I’ve lost years of my life to it. I almost _lost_ my life to it.” There was a fierceness in TK’s face now, and that small, shy hope that had taken root in Carlos’s chest began to grow.

“Not anymore,” TK said. “I refuse to be controlled now. Not by addiction, or my past, or my fear. If I can save others, I can save myself too. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” TK’s eyes blazed, and Carlos could see his resolve and the hope in his eyes. For the first time since he met him, he could see TK’s power shining through him.

“I’m a mess, Carlos. I’m fucked up. I get it if you don’t want to deal with that. But I’m healing. And I’m going to keep healing. And if you still want me…”

TK took Carlos’s other hand and turned so he was facing him straight-on. “If you still want me, then I want you there for it. And I want to be there for you. I almost let you get away, but I want to learn you, Carlos Reyes. You’re different. You’re something special.”

Carlos took a shaky breath, and god damn it, he was still crying a little, but they were tears of softness, of tenderness.

“Can I touch you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Carlos let go of TK’s hands and gently cradled his face. He ran his thumb over TK’s cheekbone, and TK leaned into his touch. He felt warm and strong and _here._

“Tyler Kennedy,” Carlos said, “I have wanted you from the day I met you. I didn’t realize it until today, when everything happened, but I’ve fallen for you. I’ve been falling since the second we met. I came on too strong and I scared you away and I thought I’d fucked up my only chance with you. But you came back. We both did.”

TK’s eyes were shining, and Carlos could feel his too, shining with all the reckless love that he had for this damaged, beautiful boy.

“I’m all in, TK. You’re the bravest man I’ve ever met, and I want to see you heal, because I know you can. However you want to do this, I’m here for it. You’re something special too.”

For a moment they were silent. The only sound was the wind through the trees, bringing in the scent of the desert and the wildness of all that could be.

Then they were surging forward at the same time. And their lips were meeting and pouring promise into one another, and TK’s good arm was circling Carlos’s waist and holding on like his life depended on it, and Carlos was holding onto TK, gently but fiercely. They held onto each other, leaned on each other, and Carlos’s heart sang with joy.

Eventually they pulled back. “Thank you,” TK whispered against his lips. “Thank you for waiting for me.”

Carlos touched their foreheads together and smiled. “I will always wait for you. I promise.”

TK pulled back so he could look Carlos in the eyes, and for the first time Carlos realized they were really _seeing_ each other. Every part of each other. And Carlos wanted to keep looking until the world came to an end.

Then TK grinned, a happy, wild twinkle in his eye. “I’m not letting you get away again, Carlos Reyes.”

And a feeling swept through Carlos, a wave of happiness and love and _right_ that moved through him and fired up his bones.

The feeling stayed as he waited for TK at the firehouse as he came clean to his team, and as he curled in relief and freedom around Carlos and Carlos kissed his neck and whispered how proud he was.

And it stayed as they drove out of the city and watched the lights in the sky from the hood of Carlos’s Camaro. And it stayed and surged as TK took Carlos’s hand in his and hooked it under his arm as if to claim it.

Carlos had a feeling it would stay as long as they were beside one another. And he wanted that more than he had ever wanted something.

Carlos kissed TK’s knuckle, and TK smiled.

“Neither am I, TK Strand,” Carlos promised, smiling back. “Neither am I.” 


End file.
